Rising: Dirty Beaches

Dirty Beaches mastermind Alex Zhang Hungtai was born in Taiwan, but he doesn't have a home. Moving from place to place throughout his life due to a fractured family, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter sometimes felt adrift. In a recent phone interview, he described a stint selling real estate in China during his mid-twenties as "a weird displacement upon displacement." And that same feeling can be ascribed to his music, which layers coats of lo-fi grime over tracks that sound like relics from the early days of rock 'n' roll. Many of his songs come off like Elvis Presley relics recorded through the wall of a skeezy motel.

Hungtai started pursuing music seriously about five years ago after moving to Montreal, and has released a few 7" singles leading up to his debut LP, Badlands, out March 29 on Zoo Music. (Listen to album highlight "Sweet 17" above.) Click on to read our Q&A with the singer, who talked about connecting with David Lynch, not connecting with Facebook, and rude interviewers:

Pitchfork: When did you start playing music?

Alex Zhang Hungtai: I was a late bloomer; I didn't start until I was 20. My first band was a metal band and I was the singer-- it was an easy way to meet girls. But I got fired from that band because I was trying to sing like David Bowie. It didn't really fit too well. So I said
"fuck it," taught myself to play guitar, and started writing my own stuff. At that point, it became more about validation for myself.

Pitchfork: Your music is very evocative of the 1950s. When did you start getting into that nostalgic aesthetic?

AZH: It's not just all surface aesthetic. I read this book called The Future of Nostalgia and it mentioned that nostalgia can be a sickness or melancholia, like how immigrants that came to North America feel homesick. But I don't really have a place where I can say I was born and raised. For me, home is a collage of all these different fractured landscapes that I try to piece together.

And I think part of it has to do with me wanting to subconsciously reconnect with my father; the photo on the cover of my "True Blue" 7" is of my parents [below]. I wanted to embrace the music he used to listen to.

Pitchfork: A lot of the images associated with Dirty Beaches seem like they're from another era, too.

AZH: The way I approach my music projects is a lot like film in conception and delivery. The sound is akin to the look and soul of the film. But aesthetics alone won't carry a film too far, so you have to create a solid back story and characters that are believable. And, from a musician's point of view, a character has to be something that's from your own experience. If not, you'd get bored performing the songs.

Pitchfork: Have you ever made songs that went too far into a character and didn't have enough of yourself in them?

AZH: Oh yeah, I've done a lot of B-sides that will never see the light of day. They go all over the place from dance songs to hip-hop songs to jazz. But I'm very informally trained so it would be like fake jazz.

Pitchfork: What are some of the films that inspired Badlands?

AZH: The main inspiration definitely came from three David Lynch movies: Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, and Lost Highway. I wanted to create an abstract narrative about someone that's been possessed by the road.

Watch the Lost Highway trailer:

Pitchfork: There's this notion that the 50s represent a simpler, purer time. Is that something that you're attracted to as well?

AZH: I'm naturally old-fashioned. I don't really connect with a lot of technological advancements even though I'd really like to. Like, I think Facebook is great for bands and artists and filmmakers, but I don't like it as a way of making friends. I much prefer meeting people and just hanging out as opposed to, you know, a poke or whatever you call it.

Also, I'm very respectful to elders. A lot of people think respect has to be earned but, if someone is older than me, I tend to bring myself down a little bit and cater to them. In the same vein, I'm 30 and it kind of bugs me when some 16 year old is rude to me while I'm on tour. I get that a lot nowadays.

Pitchfork: You mean hecklers?

AZH: No, just kids that come up. I remember I was finishing a set in Montreal once, and this little kid with glasses at the bottom of the stage pointed at me and did the "come here" thing with his finger. I said, "Can I help you?" He said, "Get off the stage when you're done, I want to talk to you."

So I went over to him and he said, "I want to interview you for this blog-- how long have you been doing this?" Right off the bat, I asked him, "Are you a good person or a bad person?" He was like, "What do you mean?" I said, "If you're a good person, maybe you just like to talk fast. But if you're a bad person and you're being disrespectful-- no one fucking talks to me like that other than my fucking father. Who the fuck are you? You want to get your teeth knocked the fuck out?"

He just looked at me in awe and was like, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. That's just the way I talk." And I was like, "Well, it's a pretty rude way to talk to people you've never met before." The interview went well after that.